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Lomography LomoKino unboxing

Lomography's bonkers new analogue film camera arrives. Surely this is a wind-up?

05 December 2011/11:28GMT

No one is hankering for a return to VHS but some of us still hold a torch for Super 8. While Kodak still makes the film and second hand cameras are cheap, finding somewhere to get it processed is a struggle. Lomography has a solution: make a movie camera that uses standard 35mm camera film.

You can buy the camera on its own or in this £90 package that comes with a viewer. The camera is the bigger thing that looks like a pencil sharpener. Let's take a closer look...

There's a worryingly flimsy plastic crank on the side that's used to move the film past the lens. Your 35mm roll sits inside at the top and is wound onto a reel at the bottom. That round metal button flips out a viewfinder that helps you frame your shots.

On a 35mm roll you'd normally get 36 exposures, but a 36-frame movie isn't going to be very long, so the LomoKino finds space for four long thin frames where a camera would shoot just one. That gives you 144 frames on a roll at around 5 frames per second, creating a sequence of about 30 seconds.

You'll want to shoot on slide film rather than regular negative film and tell your lab not to cut the roll. Then you can watch your film on the LomoKinoScope. By the way, that's not a screen, it's a window that you hold up to a bright light.

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Then you put what looks like a lens to your eye and start winding. It's a bit like a What The Butler Saw machine – your own private viewing contraption. Of course what we really want is a projector. Or a lab to develop our stack of slowly decaying, unseen Super 8 movies. But for this month at least we'll be recording life in chunks of 144 frames.